This panel explores how Korean American authors, in a variety
of genres, remember or memorialize the trauma of war and racialization. While
each paper focuses on particular kinds of texts – poetry, novels, children’s
literature, and experimental writing – the panel as a whole considers how these
different sites of textual memory and trauma function differently in the acts
of writing, reading, teaching, and performing. This panel also considers the
range of audiences addressed by different texts and the importance
understanding these audiences when teaching these texts in the college
classroom. The papers draw on current scholarship on memory and literature,
placing such discussions in conversation with disciplinary critique, narrative
theory, studies of children’s psychology, and psychoanalytic criticism.

The papers on this panel all focus on Korean American texts
as an important subset of Asian American literature. Working from the field
formation “Asian American studies,” these papers draw on the specific histories
of Koreans and Korean Americans as well as the critical practices of reading
Asian American literatures through historical contexts. As each paper notes,
the Japanese colonial period and Korean War are sensitive and painful topics
for many Korean Americans. It was the most traumatic period in modern Korean
history and left indelible scars on the Korean conscience. Additionally, the LA
riots that made visible a racial rift between Korean American shop owners and
African American figures prominently in more recent writing. The papers on this
panel foreground the historical moments in these texts, paying close attention
not just to how the texts remember but also on how the purpose of remembering
shifts across genres.

In “Ishle Yi Park’s Poetic Anger and Interracial Drama,”
Paul Lai reads Park’s poetry and listens to her performances on HBO’s Def
Poetry series. Park presents a particularly rich example of how the
textualization of historical memory gets transmitted in books as well as on
cable television (and DVDs). Lai considers how poetry moves between the space
of the college classroom and the Brooklyn stage of the Def Poetry
series, offering different ways of understanding where textual meaning lies.

In “Gendered Narrative of Trauma in Chang-rae Lee’s A
Gesture Life,” Seiwoong Oh notes that father figures are often marginalized
and frequently portrayed in stereotypical ways--tyrannical, incompetent, and
inscrutable. In narratives of trauma within the genre of literary fiction, in
particular, the emphasis has largely been on the immigrant mother, whose
emotional and psychological trauma finds healing in being able to tell her life
story to her attentive daughter. Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life provides
an interesting counter-point in several ways. Not only does it focus on a male
immigrant, Doc Hata, whose traumatic experience during the Second World War
informs his life in a suburb of New York, but it also locates the trauma not in
a victim but in a victimizer. Having been in charge of monitoring the health of
military sex slaves, and having failed to protect the honor of his love
interest--a sex slave under his charge--Doc Hata suffers from a damaged
conscience and lost manhood. He therefore attempts to exonerate himself by
considering himself a victim of an imperialist state. In order to re-build his manhood,
he adopts a daughter from Korea and raises her under his strict
supervision.By examining the
father figure in A Gesture Life, therefore, Oh shows how trauma is
perceived, experienced and healed differently by the Asian American male.

In “Silence in Children’s Fiction: Memories of Korea
1935-1953,” Sarah Park examines the specific cultural work of children’s
literature in figuring memories of the Korean War. Park notes that since 1991,
six children’s fictional books appeared that address this time period in
Korea.Given this emerging
presence of Japanese colonialism and Korean War stories, Park asks, “How does
children’s literature portray the complexity and tragedy of Japanese
Colonialism and the Korean War?”By adopting theoretical frameworks used to analyze literature about the
Holocaust and other traumatic events, she analyzes the literature to see what
types of stories are shared, which parts of history are reconstructed through
the literature, whose points of view and voices are speaking, and to what
extent the stories reveal the violence and oppression of the colonial period
and Korean War.The findings from
this study shed light on how trauma regarding modern Korean history is
remembered in literature for youth. Park’s research importantly studies
literature in the context of library science.

In “Hypnosis and Memory in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee,”
Jeehyun Lim takes up Cha’s once-forgotten but now canonical text (within Asian
American literary studies) as a way to consider the textualization of history
and memory as hypnosis. Lim discusses how Dictee reworks history and
memory through a deliberately fragmented narrative structure and explains how
this reworking has been central to the way Asian American literary studies has
imagined its own turn to a more mediated relationship to historical context.
Lim argues that Dictee disavows the hypnotic effects of memory – its
ability to lull individuals into states of paralysis – even as it enacts its
own hypnosis on the reader. As a hypnotic text itself, then, Dictee
stages a particular encounter with readers that is ideal for challenging how
memories might lead to injured subjects.

Bios

Paul Lai’s research focuses on disciplinary critique and the
formation of Asian American studies as an academic field. His interests cross
various literary and media forms, and he examines how these forms engage with
different audiences, generic conventions, and technologies. His book-length
project focuses on how artists and scholars articulate sounds (such as screams
and popular music) to the political project of Asian American studies.

Seiwoong Oh has published widely on American and
postcolonial multicultural literature. He writes on cross-cultural readings,
memory, and ethnicity in literary fiction. His previous research focused on
anthropological readings of multicultural literature, particularly as
exemplified by the trickster figure.

Sarah Park’s research is in library science and children’s
literature. She has created bibliographies of Asian American children’s
literature and is currently working on a project examining the representation
of Korean adoptees in children’s literature. She has received a grant to
encourage young scholars to enter the field of library science, and she
presents her research widely as part of this effort.

Jeehyun Lim researches contemporary American literature,
focusing primarily on the intersection of Asian American and African American
literary studies. Her interests include literary imaginings of history and
memory as well as on discourses of race and psychoanalysis. She examines how
experimental as well as more mainstream texts enact affective meanings by way
of hypnosis and other subjective states.